School Without Fear

Editions:Paperback

Pages:222

The dialogues in this book School Without Fear are being published sixty years after Krishnamurti held them at Rajghat Besant School, which he had founded on the banks of the Ganges in the early 1930s. From December 1954 to February 1955, he stayed on the campus and talked to teachers and parents.

Ranging from articulating his most sublime vision of life to thrashing out the practicalities of running a boarding school, he covers every conceivable aspect of education. The result is these twenty-six dialogues, which perhaps form the longest series of dialogues on education in the entire Krishnamurti repertoire.

Can we discuss the question of the competitive spirit, how to eradicate it, because that may be one of the fundamental reasons why society is crumbling. Culture is crumbling because of this terrible spirit of competitiveness, with its ambition, comparison, and condemnation, and can we eradicate it totally in this school? Giving various reasons, will that really bring about a dynamic activity to create something new? Merely examining the hindrances, will that produce any result? By discussing thoroughly the problem, the competitive spirit in students and in us, we will come to the fact that it exists. Perhaps if we can go deeply into whether it is true and whether we should encourage it, whether we should discourage it, and why we should discourage it, then we shall be able to deal with the other problems.

Are we ready to expose what we really think— whether we really do believe in competition or whether we don’t care? Are we just caught in circumstances and go along that way? If we are challenged, do we ask whether we really believe in competition with all its implications and therefore we cannot discourage it? If we think that is essential, we cannot discourage it. Does competition bring freedom? Does competition within a society bring peace to the society? Or must society everlastingly be in conflict within itself? And can we create a society in which there is no conflict at all, but where no man is trying to become something but is doing something which he loves to do, and therefore there is no ambition, competition, and struggle with the neighbor? Which means, can we help the student to find out his true vocation, not what society or his father or tradition says he must do, but what he really wants to do? If all of us together say this is what we stand for, then we will die for it, work for it. Do we discuss it with our hearts in it, or merely casually as we have done these last three years?